Google has barred 2.28 million apps from the Google Play Store for violating its policies last year.

The company banned 333,000 bad accounts from the Play Store repeated server breaches created by criminals and fraud. Similarly, Google rejected almost 200,000 app submissions to ensure proper adherence to sensitive policies such as background location and SMS access.

Google said it had strengthened its processes for onboarding. Reviewing developers, requiring more identity information when developers first establish their Play accounts.

Around 1.5 million services that didn’t comply with the company’s updated application programming interfaces (APIs) are no longer accessible in the Play Store for new users who have updated their devices to Google’s latest Android version.

Google has made changes to its App Defense Alliance (ADA) by teaming up with Microsoft and Meta as steering committee members. ADA is now managed by the Joint Development Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation family. However, This alliance aims to improve app security practices and be ready to handle new security threats.

These safety efforts aren’t just for apps on the Google Play Store. Google has improved Play Protect to scan apps downloaded from other app stores for potential threats in real time. It claims to have identified over five million new malicious apps outside of Google Play. Moreover , Play Protect’s machine learning algorithms continuously learn and improve at identifying threats over time.

This website necessity holds particular significance to enable users to ask for account and data deletion without reinstalling an application. To streamline user interaction, we’ve additionally integrated this functionality into the Data Safety segment of the Play Store.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/04/how-we-fought-bad-apps-and-bad-actors-in-2023.html